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This image PR episode 1,779 before entitled 12-tone music, and my random 12-tone role on the May.

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It is posted by John Colp, and in about 14 minutes long.

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The summary is an intro to 12-tone music, and my random 12-tone role on the May mask ripped.

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This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.

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Hey everybody, this is John Colp and Lafayette Louisiana, and I'm excited today because I've got

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a special microphone on loan to me from the guy who does our music media area at the University

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of Louisiana at Lafayette where I teach.

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This is a really fancy, expensive looking, sure microphone that is what would you call this

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thing? It's in a shock mount, my clip, and I think it's going to make my voice sound

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pretty good. The microphone I used before is a sure SM58, which is more of a live-soundary

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enforcement microphone, and this one is much more of a studio microphone, and Chris recommended

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that this is the one I should use if I want to do just spoken word.

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And so I thought I would take advantage of this opportunity to knock out one of the topics

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that has been on my to-do list for a really long time, and that is the 12-tone technique

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and my use of a script to generate a random 12-tone row. This whole scripting of the random

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12-tone row is something that came about when I got my Raspberry Pi for the first time about

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two years ago. And the idea was that I had the Raspberry Pi set up next to my bed, and it was

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networked, and so I could theoretically have it play music off the internet, and I used to do that.

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I would have it stream radio stations, and stuff like that, like into my pillow speaker,

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and I thought, well, I could use it as an alarm clock as well, and I could have it just play

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some random audio file from my computer. But then I had the, what to me was a brilliant idea,

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and this is from a music nerd point of view of having it generate a new alarm every day,

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and have it be my random 12-tone row of the day. Now, to, for this to make sense, I would probably

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have to back up a little bit and explain what a 12-tone row is. The 12-tone row is the building

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block of 12-tone music. Now, I have to back up even further now, because I have to explain what 12-tone

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music is. At the early part of the 20th century, I'm talking now about the years 1908-1912-1913.

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A number of composers were experimenting with a tonality, which is the music that does not have a

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tonal center. So you can no longer say, for example, this piece is in the key of D major or F minor,

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or whatever it might be. This is music that does not have a key. There were corollary movements in the

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other arts, I think, like in visual arts, they moved toward abstraction, toward non-representation,

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and so, a tonality in music is very similar to abstract art. Now, the leader in this movement was a

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guy named Arnold Schermberg, who was a composer in Vienna, and he had a couple of students, Albambarg,

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and Anton Weber. And these guys were very much interested in a tonal music, and they did not necessarily

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see this as a break with tradition, but rather as a logical next step in the evolution of music

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that had been lately brought to what was nearly a tonality by the German composer Ricard Wagner.

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Now, Wagner's music sounds very beautiful and mostly tonal, but if you actually look at it,

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there are many places in his music where you cannot say for sure what key it's in, even though

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you hear very beautiful harmonies and melodies and so forth. And so, Schermberg and his followers

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felt like the logical next step was to intentionally abandon tonality and to avoid anything in

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their music that would suggest tonality. And so, they consciously avoided octaves and triads and

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things like this that suggested traditional tonality. And they were, you know, they had some

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music that was modestly successful, I suppose, in their little circles, the general public typically

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did not like this music very much. It was not very well received because people heard it as something

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that was very dissonant. They couldn't understand it. They didn't know where the composers were

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going with this stuff and just thought it was ugly. And the composers themselves, why they,

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while they did not necessarily think the music was ugly, they did recognize a certain problem

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in as much as they no longer had the basic foundation of musical form that had been in place

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for a couple of hundred years and that is key relations tonality in forms such as sonata form,

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binary form, things like this. The long-term structure of the piece is based on movement from one

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key to another and then back to the home key. And when the music is atonal and has no key,

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you don't have this anymore. And so, one of the solutions they had was to write just really short

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pieces where movement from one key to another would kind of be irrelevant. Another thing they did

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was write vocal music where the poetry that they were setting would give the music its structure.

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But around, I don't know, 1920 or so, Arnold Schermberg started to experiment with a new system

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that would impose a certain rigor upon a tonal music and that was the 12-tone system.

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In the 12-tone system, all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale are considered equal.

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And before I go any further, I'm going to play you a chromatic scale. A chromatic scale is

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the scale between a note and an octave higher, well, all half-step. It's the scale that has all half-steps

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and here's what a chromatic scale sounds like. Pretty, huh? All half-steps. Now,

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his idea was to have a single melody that is the structural basis of the piece. This might sound

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very familiar. If you heard my episode about the fugue where there was a subject that was the main

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idea for the whole piece. In certain ways, it is similar. He also subjects the theme, which is

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in this case called a row, a tone row, or sometimes the 12-tone row. He subjects it to the same kind

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of manipulation that, say, J.S. Bach would have done to a fugue subject. The row is transposed.

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It's inverted. In other words, it's turned upside down. So all of the intervals that went up

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in the original would go down in the inversion. It's done in retrograde and so forth.

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And so what you come up with is a kind of music that is extremely well structured. It's kind of

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fun to analyze these things because you can see where the row is and you get to put together this fancy

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thing called a matrix, which shows you all the possible permutations of the row, and you can use

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the matrix to help you analyze the music. And so it looks great on paper. It's really kind of fun.

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For me, the problem has always been that while I can recognize this rigid structure and appreciated

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intellectually, I simply cannot hear it. And so 12-tone music to me still is not all that satisfying.

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However, as a project for a Raspberry Pi where I'm trying to do something kind of nerdy and script

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something, the random 12-tone row of the day seemed like a genius idea to me. And so I wrote a

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bash script, of course, that's kind of what I do. And the bash script takes all 12 pitches of the

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chromatic scale and shuffles them and then generates a score. And I use Lily pond as the main

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engine for all of this. So my script, I think I'm just in the show notes, I'm going to link

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to my 12-tone row of the day web page. And every night at either midnight or when I am or something

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like that, the script runs on my server and posts a static HTML page with the 12-tone row of the

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day as a little bit of score and also has a play button under it so you can listen to it. And in general

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terms, the way this script works is that I spell out all 12 pitches in Lily pond notation. So

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c, c sharp d, d sharp e, f sharp and so forth. And then I run them through the shuff command, s, h,

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u, f which will take them from their ascending order that I just spoke out to you and shuffle

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them all around randomly. And then what I do is add a series of rhythms to them. And I have a

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two-do in my script and that is to randomize the rhythms. Now I never did this but there was a guy,

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I want to say he was in great Britain somewhere who contacted me after reading my blog post about this

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and thought, man, what a cool thing to do. I'm going to try to randomize those rhythms. And he

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did it and he came up with a solution and I'll be honest, I don't remember where it is or that.

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I don't have it in front of me here. So I apply rhythms using the Lily pond number

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like the first rhythm is a quarter note. Then there is a double dotted quarter note,

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followed by a sixteenth note, followed by a quarter, a dotted quarter, an eighth, a dotted eighth,

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and then a dotted half. And all of these will add up to the right amount of rhythms.

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So anyway, I apply some rhythms. The pitches have been shuffled randomly. And then I have a

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block of code that will stick all the pitches in the right place in a Lily pond file. And then I run

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Lily pond on this file to create the score and to create the MIDI file. After that, there is a

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function that will optimize the PNG file by running OPTPNG. And also, it uses the net PBM tools,

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which I planned to record an episode about the net PBM tools again later. But it converts the

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PNG file to P&M so that it can be worked with and then runs it to PNG again, creating a transparent

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background by finding every pixel on the whole thing that is white and turning a transparent.

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And then I run the optimized PNG command on it to reduce the file size.

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After that, there is a function that creates a block of static HTML and sticks the image and

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the image in there. And then it also puts an HTML5 audio player. And at some point, there must be,

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oh yeah, here it is. I use timidity to play the MIDI file and pipe it through lame the MP3

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engine. And then I use MP3 to org on that MP3 file to make an org version. So I end up with a

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MIDI version MP3 and org. And all of those are stuck in the right place and a web page is generated

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that has the image, the audio file. And also has a link to my script that does the whole thing.

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Now, let's listen to one example. I just generated this one a few minutes ago. Here's an example

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of a 12-tone row of the day. Beautiful isn't it? Wouldn't you like to be woken up by that every day?

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Now, I never did actually use this as an alarm like the original intent was, but I still periodically

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will go back to my 12-tone row of the day page and just play the example. A new one is generated

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every day. However, I probably don't look it more than once one of them per month. Anyway,

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hope you guys have enjoyed hearing about that technique from the early 20th century, the 12-tone

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technique. And I'll have links in the show notes to more information about that if you're at all

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curious. But thanks for listening. This has been John Colp on a new microphone in Lafayette,

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Louisiana, and I am signing off now. Bye.

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How easy it would be is. Heck, I probably radio was found by the digital.com and the

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informomicon computer club, and it's part of the binary revolution at binref.com.

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